API Documentation

General Info

Embedly strives to be the go to place for previewing and embedding urls. We
offer methods to make it simple to embed content from multiple sources via one
API. Embedly uses the oEmbed spec when returning an embed
object. You should be familiar with it before continuing. Feel free to contact
us at support@embed.ly.

Basics

The oEmbed spec is an excellent way to embed content via
an API. The problem lies when trying to embed content from multiple sources.
Embedly aims to solve this problem by providing one endpoint that covers a
multitude of services. This document will outline how to interact with the API
and a few best practices.

At a very basic level Embedly takes a url and provides a visually
representation of the content in that page. Think turning a YouTube url into a
video or a Flickr url and turning it into an image. This allows developers to
create rich experiences for their users. For a list of sites that already use
Embedly, check out the developers page.

Tutorial

To get you started we created a short tutorial using Embedly jQuery. It will run through the process
of picking providers and implementing your very own Embedly powered site.

oEmbed

Service

The Service API is used to manage the services that Embedly offers. We
ask that you filter the urls you send to the oEmbed API with regular
expressions, so we only serve requests for domains that we support.
Consistently sending urls from domains that we do not support is a red flag to
us that you are abusing the system.

Authentication

Embedly does not require authentication or registration at this time. We want
to make the API as accessible as possible. The main problem with not requiring
registration is that we have no way of contacting developers when we add new
features or change existing ones. We suggest following
@embedly on Twitter.

We do block IPs if we feel you are abusing the service. If you feel that you
were blocked by mistake contact us at
support@embed.ly. One way to assure that we don’t
mistake you for an abusing service is to use a User Agent. Something like
Mozilla/5.0(compatible;[yourappname]/[version];+[contactinformation])
for instance Embedly’s is
Mozilla/5.0(compatible;Embedly/0.2;+http://support.embed.ly/)